Recently I read that the Amish (who are descendants of Swiss German emigrants) are an anarchist society. I don’t really agree with that. They maybe have little hierarchy and have limited acceptance of government but they live their lives according to religious dogma. There are some anarchist aspects, I suppose, such as their sense of community and their self-organisation but fundamentally they are different from how I envisage an anarchist group. Of course, historically much of human society has been anarchist and there are still some groups of people who live in this way without calling themselves anarchists. Primitive societies are generally self-organising and are or were sometimes without government. Maybe our next human civilisation will be anarchist in nature. I hope so. In the meantime, I don’t think our modern greed-driven capitalist societies, which we misleadingly call democracies, can be painlessly converted into something more humane and less motivated by individual greed. Anarchism could come only after the collapse of the present civilisation. Just like previous lost civilisations which collapsed through insufficient resources, we are ourselves outpacing our resources. Some quick fixes are buying us time but there are just too many of us and we are expanding while our resources are running out. Or at least we have outpaced the speed at which we can access these resources. Soon there will be even more war, even more disease and, especially, even more hunger. We will be fewer than one billion by the end of the century predicts James Lovelock. Who can predict if our next civilisation will be more humane than the current one.
Liam Mor's Blog